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“I’m 29 years old and was born on board of a colony ship that is now on its course for 75 years. It’s heading to a planet that we think is inhabitable. It must be. There is no turning back. Our homeworld is dying. No, it’s not our fault. It’s just nature’s course. And our species… in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was the biggest endeavour ever taken to create the biggest colony ships to date. I’m one of 25.000 people on board of one of these ships. A lot of precious resources went into these ships. Not everyone was for it. It caused a lot of uprising. But it was important to keep the hope of our species alive. There are more ships. All heading to different destinations.

We just now reached a good enough distance to our target planet to efficiently probe it. One of the first probes we sent took about 5 years to reach the planet. When they ship wide published the results my first thought was "We’re Home!". All the readings looked perfect. There even was a photo. Man! I can’t wait to get there! It looks like paradise! It looks like heaven!”

This pic was originally a concept art commission I did a few months ago. It got rejected for reasons I can’t exactly understand… since I followed instructions from the Art Director. Weird weird thing. However. Instead of leaving this nice piece to slowly fall apart on my hdd, I decided to do something with it. Much like my ‘Hades’ duo from 2008, this is the first of two pics showing pretty much the same place. This pic was fun to do and certainly looks cool… that’s at least what I think.

Technically it’s a Vue 3d render for the base and some Photoshop to get details and atmosphere right. The weird rock formations were done with Zbrush. Experimenting with that stuff lately. Creating rocks and alien looking formations is pretty easy with Zbrush. And that’s all I’m able to do with it. It can do so much more. However. This Zbrush excursion helped me to learn a few things and will hopefully lead into some more exotic looking landscape pics in the future. We’ll see that…

intel i7 920 - 12gig ram depending on the load of the scene (number of objets etc) 5000px can kill my machine. 4000px is more managable here especially when you're working with the 'resume render' option a lot - scene shouldn't be too heavy, reduce the multipass options to a minimum. lots of technical stuff.

My god, you made this all on your own? It's extremely impressive, almost as though as if it were a photo o.oEverything in this picture looks extremely realistic, along with the waterfall, the valley and the tree

This is truely beautiful, I would almost believe you had actually visited an alien world to get this shot. I would love to see some tutorials outlined how you accomplished some elements of realism here.

I was about to say the artwork and story was sounding a lot like Avatar, but I think your intro was a bit more complex and realistic anyway. But man were they taking a gamble by heading to a planet that they "think" is inhabitable As for the other ships going elsewhere, I think they would screw with my mind forever, knowing that there are actual humans out on other planets rather than the expected alien species, and wondering how each settlement will start out pretty much the same but evolve so differently over hundreds or thousands of years, or even not last to begin with

Anyway, I really like the scene. Reminds me of something I did for myself that actually has similar origins too. It was a piece that was going to make or break my search for being a paid Vue artists for a company. I thought it was pretty good but they mustn't have since I never heard back from them. Rather than let it be a waste of all that works I just changed a couple of things and turned it into a personal piece